[mythtv-users] advise/suggestions on how to set up my drives?

[Steven Adeff]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 12:14 PM, R. G. Newbury <newbury at mandamus.org> wrote:
> On 03/22/2010 11:12 PM, Steven Adeff wrote:
>>
>> So I'm building a box for my parents. It will have one QAM PCI tuner
>> and two firewire connected cable boxen (possibly one/two via HDPVR
>> depending on what channels they can record over firewire). We've
>> bought three 1.5tb SATA drives and I'm wondering how I should set them
>> up to host as recordings space and media space (music, dvd rips, etc)
>> to maximize speed for recording and space for both?
>>
>> Thanks for the help folks!
>
> This topic has been thrashed to death in at least three different threads
> over the past couple of months.
> Best go to gossamer-threads, and search the list archives. A good search
> term would involve 'partition'.
>
> The short answer is that you really want a small drive for the OS and large
> drives for the video store. You want the OS and mysql database on a
> different spindle (ie drive) from the video. You need different optimization
> for the OS (many small files) and the video partitions (a few really large
> files). So the OS can be on ext3/4, while the video should be something like
> xfs with an allocsize=512M setting.
>
> You only need about 16G for the OS on a straight mythbox. If you use an SSD
> drive, there are further optimizations for all of the OS partitions. And
> there are optimizations for where/how certain things are set up among the
> partitions used for the OS (including /tmp, /var and swap usage).
>
> This *can* be done on with partitions on a very large drive, but at some
> point, you will end up with the system attempting to write database entries
> on one partition, and video onto another partition, on the same
> spindle...which is not good.
>
> Geoff


sorry, I should have been more specific. I already have the OS/SQL on
a seperate 7200rpm 40GB MB cache drive. What I'm trying to figure out
is the best way to set up the three 1.5TB drives to be used as a
media/recordings drive. all the recordings and DVDrips/ripped
music/etc will go on this, so I'm interested in what will give me the
best combination in speed for writing/reading for recordings (two
firewire tuners one clearQAM tuner) and of course size. Of course it
would be nice to have some level of redundancy for the media stuff
(dvd/music rips). So one option is obviously RAID 5 across the drives,
which if they decide they want more space they can always add more
drives to the array. This I know is good for redundancy and ok for
speed. But are there other options I should look at?

-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User:Steveadeff
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